Oh, so you have sympathy

10th September 2025 is the day I realized these people had been making a fool of us all. A show almost.

Sympathy is described as a common feeling between human beings: pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. When I put on the news, I cannot help but feel sympathetic. When I scroll and see a person begging for attention I am filled with shame first, then sympathy. Shame because I cannot do more in that moment, sympathy because these are lives being lived under unbearable weight.

When I read stories, watch videos depicting the misery some kids are living in, the nightmare women go through, stories about cities where the sky never clears, always painted with a dark red, always filled with screams and fear, I feel sympathetic. How can you not? They are human beings. They look like me, like you. They bleed the same color blood. Do I really need to define humanity to you so that you might feel? The question was never whether you know they are human. You know. The question is whether you care.

For so long, I thought people lacked understanding—that they failed to grasp that the suffering “far away” was as real as the suffering next door. I was wrong. It was never a lack of knowledge , it was a choice. However, it was never “them and us,” never some spectacle you could watch from your living room, detached and entertained. It was never your decision to grant or withhold humanness.

Last month in September, someone was shot and killed, a murder in the open field. It was brutal, blood gushed out with so much speed that it was impossible to imagine a recovery. But their loved ones still carried them to a hospital, clinging to hope that they wouldn’t die- not in this way, these circumstances, not now. They were too young to get taken out like that, they did not deserve it. That was Islam Abdulaziz Nouh Majarmah—a 14-year-old kid who was murdered by Israeli forces¹. Yet you probably don’t know his name. You probably did not see his face on your feed or on your news. There were certainly not 90 thousand people at his funeral. I now wonder if his mother spoke at his burial or if she was too tired of her nightmares becoming real, of her having to run away with nowhere that’s safe, tired of being tracked like an animal.

Animals—that is what some people deem other people. On what grounds? That’s what I’m trying to understand.

I also saw many send their sympathies to another person who died in September, another shooting. There was outrage, endless debates, sleepless nights, millions moved to words and grief. How curious, I thought. Why this person and not that boy? Why this uproar, but not the hundreds, the thousands, slaughtered in the same manner?

People asked me how I could stay unmoved. They looked at me with suspicion, almost disgust. As if my refusal to weep meant I had lost my humanity. No, I had not lost my sympathy. I had simply seen too many dead children. Too many families destroyed. Too many massacres disguised as “conflicts.” I was not shocked, because I had learned the brutal truth: our society does not treat all deaths the same.

Tell me, was my sympathy supposed to be rationed? Was there a manual somewhere that instructed me to mourn some faces more than others? That told me which skin color deserved pity and which deserved silence? Which blood was sacred, and which was disposable?

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” wrote George Orwell. And so it is with sympathy.

See, people have always been aware of the horrors happening around, especially in this era of social media. There’s no way they could hide in a corner of the internet where the news of genocide wasn’t mentioned. Everyone has seen the images, everyone has scrolled past the faces of the dead. But knowledge has not led to care. Because to sympathize would mean to admit those lives matter equally and many refuse to do that. It would destabilize their certainty of being more deserving. It wasn’t their issue, these were objects in the way, they said to themselves, so of course there’s no need to feel for them.

Except, the only thing separating you from the hunted is that you won geography’s lottery. Nothing more. How fragile, how thin that line is.

And so I say it is a tragedy that people are being tortured, bombed, displaced. Nevertheless, the most disheartening tragedy is that we, those who watch, who scroll, who know have accepted it as natural. The tragedy is not their loss of humanity. It is ours.

To conclude, it is terrifying how easily we have been trained to classify, to separate, to decide who is worthy of sympathy and who is not. Terrifying that we can look at a child’s body and say “not mine, not ours, not worthy.” Terrifying that sympathy has become a privilege, doled out like rations. So do not be deceived the next time you see someone turn away or dismiss a death, or scroll past a massacre. Do not tell yourself it is because of their “political neutrality ” or because they are too uneducated, or too blind to understand. No, they know. They just do not care. And that is what makes them terrifying, the cold choice to deny humanity. In doing so, they become less than human themselves.

Perhaps they were not born in your land. What choice did they have?
Perhaps they do not speak your tongue. What choice did they have?
But tell me, what choice did you have, when you were born? None.

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This was a case I was weary to write about, however, it is imperative that we talk about it. This is not the first time it happens, let’s keep educating ourselves.
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1. https://www.dcipalestine.org/israeli_forces_fatally_shoot_two_14_year_old_palestinian_boys_in_jenin